With the proliferation of wi-fi, small ad-hoc home-brewed networks are flourishing.
And with them, the opportunity for new types of location based virtual communities to flourish as well– communities whose users share both a physical social space, like an apartment, cafe, or office, and an information space, like a community wiki, blog, message board, and Internet access. The class will focus on leveraging several open source technologies to take advantage of this fertile new territory for community building. Each student will set up their own community intranet attached to a captive portal wi-fi access point using DD-WRT and PmWiki, which they will incorporate into their own community project.